Wiretap 5.07 - Tekkie Therapy

The 1999 Wiretap series focused on the possibilities of
acting, interacting and intervening in media environments
like the Internet and Virtual Reality. The series investigated
the effects of these actions through digital media on our
social and cultural environments (where we live, work, learn,
communicate and amuse ourselves).
Artists and scientists
presented projects and concepts about a special theme.
The Wiretap of the 18th of July had the theme Tekkie Therapy.

The programme Tekkie Therapy presented radical projects
and concepts in which (media) technologies were used to
level emotional blockages, to recall and work through repressed
dreams and fears, and general therapeutical applications.
Tekkie Therapy dealt with the physical and psychological
mobilisation of body and soul in the arts, science and techno-utopianism.

Context

Technology and therapy are closely connected.
Therapies have always been specific techniques of care and
treatment with or without technical apparatuses, based on
herbs, acupuncture, massages, language, technology and media
in the wider sense of the word. The technological age has
not kept its old utopian promise of an existence in permanent
happiness. On the contrary: every technology that is invented
as a remedy appears to be accompanied by new physiological
or psychological problems.
Especially in different psycho-therapies,
media and technical apparatuses are used to stimulate the
mind, to re-animate repressed thoughts and to break through
mental blockages. Even in the nineteenth century, psychiatric
patients were reminded of their own past and their "real"
existence by showing them their own portrait photographs.
Another example of a medial therapy is the test of Rohrschach,
where abstract drawings are used as an inspirational source
for free association. Nowadays, we find a growing use of
new technologies, like computergames, Internet and robotics
in such contexts.

Speakers

Wiretap 5.07 dealt
with three extreme positions in the domain of Tekkie Therapies.
The artist Erik Hobijn introduced several of his installations,
like his potential "suicide machine", through which user
and audience are offered a physically and psychologically
transgressive experience. The philosopher Henk Oosterling
talked about the unstable triangle of body, psyche and machine,
by way of an analysis of notions of technology in modern
psychotherapy. Using examples from Hobijn's work, but
also by referencing phenomena like the Tamagotchi, Oosterling
dealt with the relationship between, and the psychological
consequences of, medial interactivity and interpassivity. The cultural critic Erik Davis spoke about the Extropians,
an American sect of techno-utopians, who search for a release
from all earthly inconveniences by completely technologising
their lives. As special guests, a number of Shadow Buddies
were present, therapeutical dolls with disabilities, protheses
and beaten faces.